Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (No. 65)

Casual Walt Disney fans may be aware that “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was his first feature-length animated film, but they are unsure how to place it within his career.

The enormous and ongoing success of Mickey Mouse can overshadow Disney’s tremendous output during the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, and some just think he came up with Mickey and followed it with “Snow White.”

In reality, you can chart Disney’s progress as an innovator during the decade before “Snow White.” That film wasn’t a happy accident – although detractors called the notion of a full-length animated film “Disney’s folly” – but a natural extension of what Disney was producing since the beginning of his career. To fully appreciate “Snow White’s” impact, it’s important to understand his career leading up to that achievement.

Before Mickey Mouse made his auspicious debut in 1928, there were Alice and Oswald. And between Mickey Mouse and Snow White, there were the Silly Symphonies. All told, Disney made hundreds of short animated films between 1924 and the release of “Snow White” in late 1937.

Did you know, for example, that Walt Disney was the first recipient of the animated short film Oscar in 1932? And, did you know he would go on to win that category for eight consecutive years, through 1939? Most of those winning shorts were Silly Symphonies, and it’s here that Walt honed his studio’s storytelling flair, animation techniques and use of music that led to “Snow White.”

But let’s start with the Alice comedies. Perhaps, in a very general sense, Alice is Disney’s first princess. In 1923, influenced by Max Fleischer and his “Out of the Inkwell” series, in which animation was inserted into live action, Walt began working on “Alice’s Wonderland” and reversed the situation by inserting a live action little girl into a world of animation. At the age of 21, Disney wrapped up his completed film, grabbed a train and headed to California.

A New York distributor looking for short films ordered six Alice comedies with an option for more. Although the animation was crude on the Alice comedies, you get a sense of Walt’s sense of humor and the beginning of a musical rhythm in his work, despite these being silent. The shorts were popular, but by 1926 the comedies featured less of Alice and more animation. In 1927, by the end of Alice’s run, 56 shorts had been made.

Jump ahead past Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a successful yet heartbreaking chapter in Disney’s history) to the creation of Mickey Mouse. Walt decided he needed something to set himself apart from the competition. With the release of “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, sound put the movie business in a tizzy. As studios scrambled to adapt to the new technology, Walt realized he has an opportunity. He spent weeks in New York City before finding an inexpensive recording company to help him add sound to “Steamboat Willie.” Nearing bankruptcy, he found one theater to show “Steamboat Willie.”

And history was made. This first animated short with sound was a huge hit. All of the studios wanted Walt, but he remained independent and went with a distributor that allowed him to maintain ownership of Mickey. In less than one year, Mickey was a worldwide sensation.

However, in 1929, Walt recognized that he would be very bored just producing Mickey Mouse shorts for the rest of his life. Carl Stalling, his first musical director, suggested the idea of taking famous music and animating it. Thus, the Silly Symphonies were born.

The first, “The Spook Dance,” which was later changed to “The Skeleton Dance,” is a simple midnight dance by some skeletons in a graveyard. When Walt tried to sell it to the New York distributors, they balked and asked only for Mickey. Ever persistent, Walt found a theater in L.A. willing to show “The Skeleton Dance,” and it became a hit.

The Silly Symphonies allowed Walt to experiment. Initially, there would be no sequels or characters used from one short to another. Each was original and unique.

In the early 1930s, Walt again did something to set himself apart: He inked an exclusive two-year deal with Technicolor, and his first color cartoon was “Flowers and Trees,” a Silly Symphony. Sid Grauman, of Grauman’s Theater fame, saw a minute rough cut and loved it so much he booked it into his theater upon completion.

Much like sound made Walt and Mickey Mouse a sensation, color did the same thing, and Silly Symphonies gained in popularity. “Flowers and Trees” won the very first Animated Short Oscar.

In 1933, Walt won another Oscar for the “Three Little Pigs.” The success of the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” caught Walt off-guard, as he never dealt with a hit song before. And, breaking his own rule, Walt agreed to two sequels to “Pigs.”

But you can see how all of this built toward another innovation. Shorts like “The Tortoise and the Hare” continued Walt’s development of fairy tales and fables as subjects for his work. Much like Irving Thalberg at MGM and Sam Goldwyn, Disney had the gift of storytelling. Watch one of my favorite Silly Symphonies, “Music Land,” and see his take on a Romeo and Juliet story that brims with originality and storytelling flair.

Walt realized that he needed to push his craft yet again, and this time the path was clear: feature-length animation. He chose “Snow White” in 1934 and used the Silly Symphonies to testing various animation techniques. He developed the multi-plane camera to add depth and dimension to the animation and used it on “The Old Mill,” a simple tale filled with a style that’s detailed and sophisticated.

Finally, Walt knew that his animated shorts rarely contained humans, so he pushed his animators to learn how to draw people. As “Snow White” went into production, the perfectionist in Walt went into overdrive. The budget ballooned from $500,000 to $1.5 million, and the studio teetered on bankruptcy.

If “Snow White” looks old school when compared to Pixar’s computer wizardry of today, there’s a beauty to that old school look. It’s like storybook art come to life, with vibrant colors as well as deep, rich tones. Even today, the film spills over with charm, vivid characters and memorable songs.

Walt was adamant that this film not play like a live-action Hollywood musical. He wanted his songs to continue the storytelling. The songs were by Frank Churchill, Larry Morey, Paul J. Smith and Leigh Harline and are woven beautifully into the story – “I’m Wishing,” “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” “Heigh Ho” and “Whistle While You Work.”

His attention to detail also included the girl or woman who would supply the voice of Snow White. One talent man thought he had the perfect candidate in a 14-year-old soprano, but Walt thought the voice sounded like a woman between the ages of 20 and 30 and rejected her. That voice belonged to Deanna Durbin! Finally, when Walt heard 18-year-old Adriana Caselotti, he knew immediately that she was perfect.

The Dwarfs provide an engaging group of supporting players who provide a dose of comedy and friendly companionship for Snow White as she escapes the evil Queen, who is truly frightening. A terrifying climax with the dwarfs and the queen in a raging thunderstorm is still riveting.

What Walt may not have realized was how “Snow White” would be a blueprint for Disney films to come, with a sweet heroine, an evil female villain, and appealing supporting characters to provide comedy and help the heroine. The blandly handsome prince provided a happily ever after, but the joy was in the journey.

On Dec. 21, 1937, the film opened, and the impact was immediate. Disney wowed both the critics and the public. The film grossed $8 million in its initial run and was one of the highest grossing films of its time, running for an unprecedented five weeks at Radio City Music Hall. While the film was re-released over the years, which added to its box office take, the web site Box Office Mojo lists “Snow White” as the 10th highest grossing film of all time after adjustments for inflation, which puts its total take at $868 million.

The Academy awarded Walt a special Oscar for that achievement, which consisted of a regular Oscar and seven miniature ones.

Regardless of its box office clout and awards, “Snow White” was a labor of love for Walt Disney and a groundbreaking achievement. The abundance of animated feature films today can trace their lineage to “Snow White,” which remains an arresting, charming tale with superb music and memorable characters.

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27 Responses

Nice historical framing throughout Brian, and rightful emphasis on this as the beginning of one of entertainment’s most storied franchises.

This is much more than just a great film of course; it stands as one of the true animation classics, one of the most celebrated American films in any genre and a study in artistic excellence. But even the most extravagent hyperbole won’t do it justice.

It’s pastel cell photography remains singular in it’s painter-like beauty, the story holds children spellbound, the characters are delightful and the score (for which it’s placement on this countdown owes it’s prime salute) by Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline and Paul Smith is tuneful and operatic, standing to this day one of the best scores ever written for a Disney film. Similarly, the song “One Song” is one of the most unforgettable songs in the entire Disney catalogue, and “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and “Heigh-Ho” are rightly celebrated.

In Stephen Russell-Gebbett’s recent animation countdown at WitD, the British writer pointed to this film as a shining example of Disney excellence even while putting aside almost everything else the studio produced. Both Allan Fish and myself consider the film to a flat-ot, stone-cold masterpiece, and many others readily refer to it as their favorite Disney or favorite animated film.

Brian, this was a real pleasure to read, an extraordinary post that shows how “Snow White” was the culmination of every innovation Disney had come up with to the time it was made, but in its synthesis and expansion of these things became something new that created a template for many of the full-length animated Disney films that followed it. I am particularly impressed with the way you made the post read like a fascinating narrative moving swiftly forward but also containing an amazing amount of biographical, descriptive, and factual detail, an approach that really sets this apart from the typical post of this kind. You really covered a great deal of territory in a compact space while maintaining a tone that was consistently entertaining. That’s great writing with real style!

While I admire this film, I’m often perplexed by how so many rally around this one as Disney’s best feature.

Admittedly, the film has charm to spare and some of the most exquisite visuals in any animation feature to this date (the “spinning” room as the evil queen drinks the potion and turns into the old hag is amazing), but I really get turned off by the lackluster heroine in the piece and the overpraise of the music in the film. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like the songs in the film and they serve the film fine, but none of them bowl you over (I guess HEIGH-HO is the big showstopper) the same way WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR, I GOT NO STRINGS and GIVE A LIL WHISTLE from PINOCCHIO or APRIL SHOWERS from BAMBI do.

I’ll maintain that this film is one of the BIG 5 from WALT, but it’s nowhere in the leaque with pictures like FANTASIA and BAMBI and it really can only shine the shoes of PINOCCHIO which most experts on Disney films basically agree is his ultimate masterpiece.

Still, the film is a welcome addition to the poll and I’m thrilled that it was voted for. Brian was very thorough with his presentation above…

Count me in your confusion, Dennis. The film’s got some good things (the dwarves are fun, the Queen is cool, and that mirror, mirror on the wall is the bee’s knees) but pretty much everything else in this movie always bored me dreadfully, even as a small child. Chalk that up to growing up with different things, but I have such a fatigue with the Disney fairy-tales with their bland, vanilla princesses and prince charmings, like so many Ken and Barbie dolls. The only classic example of those films that I liked very much was “Sleeping Beauty”, where pretty much all the qualities of this movie are turned up to eleven– the princess is a little kooky, with personality, the prince is genuinely charasmatic and corageous (and he takes good care of his horse), and the Evil Queen has both style, honor and utterly intimidating power (nobody beats Malificent in the canon of Disney villains). I know that “Snow White” has its influences in everything from fractured fairy tales to “Star Wars”, but beyond a mere intellectual recognition of its impact, I can’t say it does very much for me. We’ve had a long chain-email about the question posed by films like “Triumph of the Will” and “Birth of a Nation”, and whether or not one can really be obligated to appreciate a powerful, influential film, even if it represents an allegiance with true evil. I’d like to add a movie like this to that question, not because it represents evil, but because it represents boredom, and another kind of obligation altogether.

To me, the recognition of its primal aspect is visceral not merely intellectual (or not solely intellectual). That is to say I experience a genuine sense of strangeness in the early minutes, when so much is vaguely familiar yet so much is very strange – we can see the roots of the latter-day Disney mythology but also, I think, distinguish it from that. Or at least I can. I wrote about it my review of the film last year:

“The movie offers a kind of self-discovery on Disney’s part, as they hit on the tropes, gestures, and icons which would become touchstones of the studio’s feature work. The film opens in an odd, ethereal, somewhat unfamiliar mode. Many animated fairy tales begin with a gilded book opening up, and Snow White is no exception, but for some reason its book seems older, less an item of twentieth-century nostalgia than a more authentic antique (maybe it’s the use of a term like “scullery maid” and the absence of a modern narrator on the soundtrack – the ornate words on the page speak for themselves).

There is a shimmering, mythical quality to the early passages in Snow White which make it stand out from the studio’s later attempts to modernize and familiarize the grisly folk tales being adapted (Tangled, I suppose, being the culmination of this trend). For a decade Disney had been cranking out Silly Symphonies, and these too had a kind of timeless, otherworldly appeal (an interesting contrast to the aggressively modern and adult sensibilities of Tex Avery, who would emerge soon after Snow White to offer another point of view). Yet these early shorts mostly remained rooted in a contemporary sensibility and a comic lightness that Snow White initially dispensed with. Meanwhile, the attempts at realism gives the human characters both a more concrete physical presence and a wispier sense of personality than the dancing flowers or anthropomorphized animals that flickered across Disney screens in early cartoons. Snow White, Prince Charming, and the huntsman all have a chimerical quality, making them both haunting and evasive; the Queen has a stronger presence, yet she also shimmers before us in an uneasy fashion that treads along the edge of the Uncanny Valley (in which simulated personality seems authentic yet artificial enough to make us viscerally uncomfortable).

Were the whole film in this key, it would be both more fascinating and less engaging; but that sense of self-discovery begins right away, as soon as the huntsman takes Snow White out to kill her. As he glowers in the background, unsheathing his knife, the princess dances along the hill in her familiar blue-red-and-yellow dress and cape (in the first scene she was wearing the dull colors of a maid) – now that her iconic presence is familiar to us from seventy years of Disney promoting this image, we are already beginning to familiarize and comfort ourselves in this strange environment (obviously in this case we have an advantage over 1937 audiences, who were seeing her for the first time). Even so, the huntsman – not just his actions, but his expressions – jars us out of any complacency for the time being. Then the following sequence, with the virtuoso fleeing through the dark wood culminating in the emergence of the friendly, cuddly little animals, gives us a sense of relief. At this point, Snow White has wandered out of the Grimm fairy tale and into…well, a Disney movie.”

I’m fascinated by the movie but never quite satisfied by it. Not sure why this is. Pinocchio would be my pick for best Disney, but this may be the one I return to the most for whatever reason.

Interested to know what exactly Allan thinks of this film. It placed here on this poll as his No. 28 choice on his ballot. Pinocchio placed in his 50’s.

However, if I recall correctly, PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA both made the cut when Allan presented his count of the best films of the 40’s (with PINOCCHIO placing highest)… I don’t recall SNOW WHITE even cracking his 30’s count.

Allan? Do you prefer SNOW WHITE to PINOCCHIO? Or is it you feel that SNOW WHITE is a better MUSICAL than PINOCCHIO????

I’m guessing its due to the fact that the 40s poll was a top 50 while the 30s one was only a top 25 (and while Snow White did not make that cut, he did offer up an essay for it on the site anyway). True, Pinocchio came in at #24 but perhaps overall he favors 30s films to 40s films so #24 on a 40s would be lower than, say, #26 or #27 on a 30s.

The real answer would be where it placed on his Top 3,000 but after combing it several times I can’t for the life of me find Snow White in the top 1,000 (where it would definitely be). Could it be it was forgotten??

Possibly, but as you point out Pinocchio seems to have the stronger songs (though actually I quite like a lot of Snow White’s number, Silly Song is incredibly catchy, Heigh Ho, Whistle While You Work and Someday My Prince Will Come are almost if not quite as iconic as When You Wish Upon a Star, and that first number is quite underrated). Only the Fish can tell…

However, WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR from PINOCCHIO is not only one of the greatest songs written for a Disney film (and would become the mantra for the company from the first moment it was ever heard), but probably up there with OVER THE RAINBOW as one of the two greatest in film history.

As for animation, visual virtuosity, unforgettable characters and story, tremendous diologue and technical innovation, PINOCCHIO is the top dog. And, even then, using all those points as a critria, FANTASIA would place 2nd.

Really good information that you present to everyone on a truly remarkable film. I remember seeing this in the theatre reissue in the mid 80’s when I was about 5 or 6 years old. Still remember that and the film is a treasure. It might be debatable whether Pinocchio and Snow White are better “films” than they are “musicals”, but they both clearly deserve mention on this list and would place slightly higher on my own list in fact. For instance, I consider both these films to be better than Beauty and the Beast, but Beauty and the Beast I consider to be a better musical.

“I love that Brazilian poster. I wonder what the Polish one was? Probably a giant green monster eating its hand, or something equally strange and unsuitable (and awesome).”
Hi! Joel…
I thought so too…until I did a little research and surprisingly, it’s quite colourful…Granted, I had to enlarge the poster causing some pixelation.
[Due to fact, that a suitable size wasn’t to be found out there on the internet.]
By the way, I did feature the beautiful, but quaint poster Of the wooden boy when the Pinocchio review was posted. [The caption featured an acknowledgement Of writer Paul D.Brazill who was born in the U.k., but now reside in Warsaw, Poland.]

Wow … lots of discussion here, and thank you for the compliments. For me, watching “Snow White” and knowing what an achievement it was at its time counters some of its weaknesses. Clearly Disney was not one to rest on his laurels. For example, he was not happy with how the humans were animated, and that clearly improved. “Pinocchio” is a magnificent follow-up to “Snow White” and improves on nearly every aspect of “Snow White,” from the animation to the music to the heart-rending story.

Brian – Marvelous. A truly fascinating combination of Disney history (my own knowledge of it was sketchy) and perceptive commentary on “Snow White” itself. I’m of the opinion that modern animation seems somewhat cold and shallow in comparison with Disney’s earlier efforts. “Snow White” has so much richness and depth, as you point out, “like storybook art come to life.” I must’ve been about 5 when I first saw it in one of its re-releases – and I think it must be my first movie memory – how lucky is that?

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Wonders in the Dark is a blog dedicated to the arts, especially film, theatre and music. An open forum is highly encouraged, as the site proctors are usually ready and able to engage with ongoing conversation.